Figure 8: Literature Nobel Prizes 1901-2009:
Evolution of cumulative national shares by country of birth.
The vertical width of a nation's colored
band at each year measures its percentage of all Literature Prizes
up to that year (image height = 100%).
France took the lead in 1901;
Denmark caught up in 1902,
Norway in 1903,
then France alone led until 2009,
except for the period 1910-1921,
when Germany was ahead.
From Evolution of National Nobel Prize Shares in the 20th Century,
Jürgen Schmidhuber, 2010.PDF. HTML. .